


keep me darling (in that little space & leave me)

by edel_im



Category: Dong Bang Shin Ki/DBSK
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, Implied Incest, Sibling Love, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 18:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7185395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edel_im/pseuds/edel_im
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>she had a habit of leaving, and Jaejoong was stubborn enough to wait.</p>
            </blockquote>





	keep me darling (in that little space & leave me)

**Author's Note:**

> they call it distraction. i call it stress relief.
> 
> unbeta-ed for now.

I. 

“Come, Jaejoong, and meet your sister.”

He watches as the babe is set down on the makeshift bed - covered in blankets of fur in his parents’ solar. She is a small thing, a shifting mass of fair skin and brown eyes that might be a little too knowing for her age. He finds himself hovering by her, distracted from what was supposedly a good play of swords by this.. this mystery he is drawn to. There’s a mark on her left wrist and he dares touch it one night when the everyone had gone to the hall to sup and he finds it just a patch of raised skin, a mark nevertheless but nothing peculiar. His - Their - brother had a mark on his face from an accident two summers ago and nobody makes mention of it. No one is seemingly bothered by it.

It’s the warmth that unsettled him, he would decide years later. The warmth that traveled through him the moment he touched that mark. It reminded him of his lady mother’s embrace, the elation that first time his lord father allowed him to ride his steed, swordplay fights with his brothers and running in the fields barefoot and muddied. She had stirred then, opened her too-aware eyes to look directly at him, and for a moment the warmth intensified, sweeping through him, and he knew that she was different. But then she smiles, child-like and toothy and makes those gurgling noises and he chooses to forget, sweeps away the knowledge and lets her little fingers wrap on his own, smiling back down at her because she’s a Maistrian now, Princess of Eravim, his sister. He decides he was going to love her as one.

When she disappears from her cot a fortnight later, Jaejoong feels he lost a part of himself to the brown-eyed babe named Cassandra.

 

II. 

Father finds a litter of wolf pups - one for each of them. Or so everyone thought. It was Jaejoong who voices it out while his brothers were already busy playing with their pets. 

“What about Cassandra?” 

He was a child of one and ten then, the coming summer marking the fifth she had gone. The question brings the elders pause, and he sees the pity in their eyes - for him, for his father who had a grim line on his mouth now, for his mother whose eyes were brimming with unshed tears for the babe they saved and lost many moons ago.

They had forgotten her, he thinks.

It was their youngest who breaks the silence, his pup cradled in his arms. “She could have mine.” And almost instantly the rest of his brothers were willing to share. He would have done the same, without doubt but, “She would have liked one for her own,” was what he whispered.

When he is found unconscious in the woods the next morning, his wolf and another one not belonging to his brothers playing not too far from him, he tells his lord and lady parents about the dream.

“I saw her, mother. She’s grown now.” The pup - hers - wiggles against his arm and he sets it down. “She told me that Gyneara couldn’t come where she’s going and asks if we could care fo her until she returns?”

Jaejoong begins to feel guilty then, because his mother is sobbing again. He begins to apologize but his father crouches in front of him, grasping both of his shoulders when he asks, “Where did you see her, boy?”

“In the woods, by the same tree you found her the last time.”

“How did you--?”

“She told me, Father. Truly. And she asks to tell you not to worry so. She will be back, after all.”

“When?” was the almost simultaneous question.

“A hundred moons from now.”

 

III.

The day she was to return, there was a thrum of anticipation within the castle. Whispers of the returning princess, of magic and sorcery, of legends and hearsay echo throughout until there is a mixture of excitement and restlessness. Their mother is among the afflicted, and their father’s expression is much more schooled but still telling. He had to chuckle at the contradiction that people prepared a feast and yet are conflicted between believing and not. His brothers are not any better, for as night rolls they shift from concern to barely concealed excitement, all wondering how she would be, to impatience and then back to worry. He sits among them and waits, simply because she told him to. He knows she’ll make good on her word.

It was the wolves who sense her first, for they stand as one, and as eerie as it looked it was the sound of howling that chills them. Gyneara runs for the door and into the woods, closely followed by the others, and only after do their humans chase them. Jaejoong could not describe that moment - when he stood at the steps of the castle and waited with bated breath. Their men-at-arms were not too far behind, carrying torches, all waiting, all wishing for the promised miracle. 

The wolves howled again as one, and then it appears from afar - a cloaked figure walking through snow, flanked by six grown wolves. His - Their - mother gasps softly and they are seemingly stoned, confined to watching the spectacle of the cloaked form stop in the middle of the courtyard. The wolves sit surrounding her, as if guarding for danger for which none is present here. There is only anticipation as a hand lifts to draw the hood back and it felt longer than seconds until her face is revealed and his first thought was how grown she’d become. How beautiful. 

Fair lady with the brown knowing eyes.

That warmth threatens to swallow him up again but he stems the urge to move, watching instead as she sinks into a deep curtsy. “My Lord, my Lady, brothers, I have missed you so.”

And just like years before she erupts in this wide unwavering smile and everything happens all atvthe same time. Mother sobs, Father trembles, his brothers curse under their breaths and Yoochun is smiling wide and Jaejoong descends the steps, closer to her until they are close enough for now and he takes her in, silently, warmly. She’s crying as she looks back at him, and even her tears are pretty. He finds himself smiling back.

“Dear sister, you are late.”

She chokes in her tears before she laughs, and when she launches herself at him amd he holds her tight, he wonders howbit was possible to be completed by someone he barely knew.

She remains a precious month, staying long enough to wreak happy havoc in all their lives. They were complete, for once and she was in the middle of it. 

It might be because it’s her, or because he’s the eldest among them that he feels more protective than the rest. He doesn’t stray far, alway wanting her within his sights and she teases him for it but he knows she understands. The way she clings onto his arm when they walk about, nor when she beams up at him and sweetly calls him Brother tells him so.

The night she left, she had kissed his forehead and wished she could bring him to the other side. he wished it too and knew it was impossible as soon as he was toldnof the news the next morning.

IV.

They were in the midst of war when she returns and everything has changed. He is Lord to Eravim now, the presumed rightful heir to the throne, Yunho is his Lord Commander and the rest of their brothers are in another land gaining men for their cause. mother died three moons following Father and she weeps for them, because she has missed too much, will forever miss too much and she curses what had once been a gift. Jaejoong reads the same pain in Yunho’s eyes as they hold her sobbing form. This was the truth - they could never go back to that one month many many moons ago. War is upon them, death even more so, and she would be leaving. If there was paradise here then it is twisted, bitter and fleeting.

They hear of Yoochun’s success in securing the troops of the Lone Man for thema and of Junsu’s alliance by marriage to the Thurdell’s and expects his return with the men of the clan. She sobs from fear and then relief when they hear that Changmin had survived the ambish attack on their way back to camp and is recovering. They were all coming back and Cassandra waits, fearing she’d have to go anytime now. She tries to win this war for her brothers, for this family, because she knows they will, because she’s from the other side and she knows but until everything is done right, until she has given them all that could help, she will not rest. There is only so much she could give without changing the course of this time, too afraid that overstepping would mean losing this, her home, them. 

She’s too afraid to be gone that she lays in between Jaejoong and Yunho, resisting sleep despite their warmth and coaxing and it does escape her that they hold her a little closer, as unwilling to sleep as she is as nights pass.

They draw strength from the other, desperately so, and she understands more than she knows and she almost relishes being needed. She becomes whoever they need her to be - sister, friend, amd maybe something more. She wakes to the intimate press of Yunho’s thighs between hers, Jaejoong’s lips on the nape of her neck. In the morning they are once again King, Lady and Lord Commander, trying to win a war for the people but at night, they were fighting a war for themselves.

When they emerge as victors, as she knew they would, she weeps because she remains, her brothers are all alive despite being far for now, she is home and Jaejoong is there. Jaejoong who traps her between himself and the wall, kissing her hard and hungrily, desperately telling her words she believes as truth, leaving her breathless and still taking her higher until she forgets, chooses to forget because it’s him and he gives her this kind of warmth - beautiful and addicting - and she doubts she knows how it is but she basks in it, loses herself in it. In him, in them. They are a mess of breath and touch and he is full of them, sputtering words she all hears and takes to heart but refrains from returning except for kissing him back just as hard. He whispers, he pleads, Don’t go and she lies for both of them. He begins to tell her something else but she shakes her head, because this was something she was going to spare him from, believing that whoever utters the words would be broken far more than the other. The fairytale had gone far enough. If one was to wake, she wanted it to be him.

So she whispers them against his lips, his skin, everywhere she could and wanted, unaware that when the king wakes to find her gone yet again he weeps, broken just as badly as her.

 

V. 

Yunho watches and he sees. His brother was grasping at straws and failing, barely holding on. He watches and understands. 

Jaejoong might have been destined to be king, but there is no glory when he loses his heart. He loved her, more than he did, more than their brothers. He loves her still, but she is gone.

Yunho curses, he watches and he too, fails.

 

 

Jaejoong kneels by the tree, just as he did everyday since she left. He loses count of how many times he had gone, keeping the small vigil of waiting and praying for her return. She had told him before to wait. He will.

His desperation grows by day now, his hopelessness pounding at the door he so stubbornly kept shut just to have her with him a little while longer. But the tree is dying. The leaves have turned from green to orange to brown, and unlike the color of her eyes, this is the wilting shade. The bark had darkened and started to rot. Jaejoong waits for more now - for the tree to regain its lush green and earthiness, for this nightmare to end and ultimately, for her to return. To him.

It succumbs the night of the storm and he watched from the keep as it groaned at the gust of wind that fell it, seemingly its last breath. There is a kind of numbness that arrests him, and he’s afraid to admit that the warmth is gone, that it may never come back. Should he release her? His mind rallies for it. His heart though, stubborn piece of him, argues. Very loudly. He listens to their warring as the wind howls outside. The storm lasts two nights, just as does inside him and by the time the sky clears, he has decided.

Just once more. One last time.

He descends the steps of the keep,his wolf Nero and Gyneara flanking him. Men are up and about, but it’s the shouts that catch his attention and he swivels just as her wolf, once again launches for the woods. His heart starts, hope flaring from the embers and he finds himself walking faster, until he is running and running and he comes, barely halting, to the clearing.

His eyes are wild, his lungs are screaming for his next breath and his heart hammers hard on his chest. The wolves are nowhere to be found but he knows.

He knows.

Changmin catches his eye when he rises from behind the fallen tree. It’s a split second befor ethe slow smile comes, and their youngest is laughing and Jaejoong is running again and suddenly he’s there and she’s in his arms, unconscious but alive. his fingers shake when he reaches for her face and it might have been the cold in them that wakes her but he will apologize later because he’s leaning down to listen to her whispered question,

“Am I late this time?”

And he’s laughing and kissing her because it’s been so long and it was so sweet and No she could never be late.

He tells her the words this time, and even as the wolves howled loud and long, the smile she gives tell him she heard all of it.


End file.
